1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology preferably applied to service in connection with a mobile radio terminal (information terminal), such as a mobile telephone, and a service providing apparatus, such as a call (or customer) center. More particularly, the present invention relates to a service providing apparatus, which service is performed using an information terminal, a method for providing such service, a method for purchasing a commodity using an information terminal, and an information terminal.
2. Description of the Related Art
In accordance with a recent severe competition in providing service, a CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) system, in which a computer is highly connected in operations with telephones, has been regarded highly. The CTI system intends to improve service to a customer mainly by efficiently executing inquiries and receiving orders of an inquiry or an order receipt from the customers in a call center, and is now brought into practice.
In a CTI system, when a customer makes a telephone call to a call center (an operator terminal (computer)), the customer is specified based on calling number notification information and then information about the user is displayed on a screen of the operational terminal (e.g., in the form of a pop-up screen) by retrieving the information about the customer in a information managing system, such as a customer database. Therefore, since an operator responds to the customer over the telephone with reference to the information about the customer, it is possible to provide smooth and careful service to the customer.
Nowadays, with a drastic spread of mobile telephones, it is becoming common to make a phone call to a call center using a mobile telephone. Latest mobile telephones are used for not only voice communication but also data communication, such as browsing the information (contents) of URLs (Uniform Resource Locations) in the form of HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) documents over the Internet (WWW (World Wide Web)).
As a result, many people are recently positively approaching an execution of various online trading (e-commerce; electric commerce), such as a reservation/sale of a ticket or a deal of a share, on WEB using a mobile telephone. At that time, the each customer has to be correctly specified upon receipt of such WEB service. It is mainstream that the customer is specified (verified) by inputting a password which has been previously registered in a service provider upon member registration.
However, when such password is communicated via the Internet (the Internet line), to which any unspecified user can make an access without scrambling it in accordance with encryption communication protocol, such as SSL (Secure Socket Layer) as known widely, there is a possibility that the password can be easily read by unauthorized individuals. Therefore, it is a cause of great concern in a security problem.
It is preferable that encode/decode means which realize a scramble process, such as SSL, are installed in a mobile telephone as ordinary personal computers so that a customer receives the WEB service, which requires to be verified a customer using a mobile telephone with relief. However, considering the capacity of CPU of the modern mobile telephone, it is very difficult to realize.
As a solution, it may be proposed that the calling number notification information of the mobile telephone is used for verifying the customer. However, since the telephone number of mobile telephone is usually reused when a subscribe use is changed to a new user, two or more different customers may share an identical calling number notification information if the telephone number is reused. It is impossible to correctly specify a user using only the calling number notification information.
Further, since the WEB service is not connected with voice communication service at a call center in the present day, the call center is incapable of recognizing which information is input by the customer by using which contents. With such system, if the customer calls the call center from a mobile telephone to, for example, make a query about a certain service, an operator at the call center never knows for which contents (WEB service) the customer calls the call center. Therefore the operator cannot provide the customer with smooth and careful voice communication service in accordance with a request of the customer.